All about the immortal J-3 Piper Cub and L-4 Grasshopper, built
by William Piper at Lock Haven, which evolved into
the PA-11 Cub Special, PA-18 Super Cub, and the Legend Cub
and other lookalikes of today

THE PIPER CUB FORUM

The Flight
in question is the roughly 4,000-mile jaunt from New York to Paris in May
1927 that made Charles Lindbergh the most famous man in the world. Dan
Hampton's account is the fifth I have read, and the first to focus on the
pilot rather than the man. It's a book for pilots, by a pilot, with
relentless attention to the endless, tiny adjustments that must be made to
fly an unstable aircraft. (Had Spirit been stable, I doubt it would
have reached Europe, for even the disciplined Lindbergh would surely have
fallen asleep.) Short of spending forty hours in a simulator, reading these
250 pages is the closest we can get to his ordeal through the two days and
a night he spent in the air. It is, therefore, a bit of an astonishment to
discover, toward the end, that a thief made off with Lindbergh's logbook
soon after he landed at Le Bourget, and that it has was never recovered. So
what did I just spend forty hours reading, a work of fiction?

I was surprised
and pleased by the enduring success of
Taildragger Tales,
a collection of five essays I wrote about flying a 1940s Piper Cub almost
as old as I was. Now it's been narrated by Kevin Theis, a Chicago actor
who among other classics has voiced A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
and Charlie Wilson's War. Buy it for $5.95 on
Amazon or
get it free with an Audible subscription. If you already subscribe,
download it from Audible.
(And if you earlier bought the ebook from Amazon, the audio version is
only $1.99.) Blue skies! — Daniel Ford